


Scatter

by xerampelinae



Category: RWBY
Genre: Child Neglect, F/M, Grief/Mourning, STRQ gaiden, Team STRQ - Freeform, Team as Family, post-partum depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:09:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13832916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xerampelinae/pseuds/xerampelinae
Summary: Weary, dragging steps carry Qrow back to the house. “Kids?” he calls as he crosses the threshold. The house is all but echoing with its emptiness. Even if Ruby were down for a nap as Summer would have had her, Yang should still be playing quietly somewhere.-Team STRQ in the days before Team RWBY.





	Scatter

**Author's Note:**

> If Naruto can include Kakashi Gaiden and have it be relevant to the greater plot, so too can there be a STRQ Gaiden.

Years later, in the dust of everything they were, Qrow will wonder how long he’d been waiting to break away from the tribe and how long Raven had been waiting to return.

Summer’s grave is empty and its marker newly hewn. Qrow stops himself from reaching out to see if it might cut him. Raven is where ever she is these days. And Tai is beside himself with grief. He’d always been so easily subsumed by grief. Qrow has never been able to do anything but struggle. It’s an edge that drinking can only soften for a time. So Qrow never stops.

Weary, dragging steps carry Qrow back to the house. “Kids?” he calls as he crosses the threshold. The house is all but echoing with its emptiness. Even if Ruby were down for a nap as Summer would have had her, Yang should still be playing quietly somewhere.

“Kids?” he calls again, feeling an acid rush of fear. He looks back to the front door: unlocked, house empty. Weary instinct rears its head and he’s taking flight as soon as he clears the threshold.

_There._ He’s tumbling out of the sky at a sprint, Harbinger settling easily in hand. He makes it, Maidens bless, he makes it just in time.

-

The first day at Beacon, Summer Rose had smiled up at Qrow and introduced herself in the depths of the Academy’s landscaping. “Happy to meet you,” she had said, and it struck Qrow then as it does now: did she mean it? Would she have said it still if she’d known what troubles the twins Branwen would bring down on her?

_Yes, he thinks._ Yes to both. That was who Summer was. She was always willing to take a harder path herself for the sake of kindness.

Summer had had to ask again what his was. It caught him off guard more than it should have.

He hadn’t been expecting another to be in the tree he’d chosen to climb. Knowing himself and knowing Summer, Qrow would still choose that tree again, even knowing Summer was there and he wouldn’t have the quiet he’d been seeking since the airship in.

He only wishes that his perch hadn’t broken under her foot on the way down. Just his luck.

-

Summer had taken the fall easily, just as easily as she would manage her landing strategy during the trials of the following day.

The bashful smile she’d worn then both comforts and haunts him now.

-

The kids are getting big. It’s what children are meant to do, Summer says--Summer said. They grow leaps and bounds while he’s away. When Yang’s mouth splits open as she cries but before she tucks her face into the protection of his shoulder, revealing a gap where one tooth has gone and another is waiting to come in.

It’s an interesting job of juggling Yang, Ruby, and the cart that Yang insists cannot be left behind. Qrow, at least, can admit to himself that he’s not used to carrying both at once. Still, the cart will be easy to dump if the need comes for his sword hand, leaving the other to balance both of the girls.

-

It had seemed lucky more than anything else when he landed in the forest and found Summer so quickly. Luckier than he ever was, even disregarding his Semblance. The tribe would have wanted him to partner with Raven--easier to avoid distracting and unnecessary attachments--but Qrow had privately argued that choosing different partners would broaden their skillset and that they would still be able to share a team.

Summer was different than what they know. Taiyang was, too, but Summer was Qrow’s partner. Summer was softer than anyone in the tribe would allow themselves to be. It was not weakness, but it was different.

When the first Grimm appeared, it was behind Qrow. Summer vanished in a spill of white rose petals and the sound of a weapon transitioning between forms triggered an instinctive turn and defensive draw of Harbinger. Before Qrow could even consider this an early but anticipated betrayal per the tribe’s teachings, he saw Summer’s tanto extending forcefully forward at the handle into a kodachi. The blade cut into a Beowolf he hadn’t even noticed approaching.

Her strength wasn’t what he expected from fighting with and alongside Raven but he could see that she utilized her weapon well: the blade of her naginata didn’t pierce the Beowolf’s neck through and through immediately but she pulled a concealed trigger and the force of several bullets help behead it.

Qrow loosed the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding when Summer turned back to him with a smile. The Beowolf turned to nothingness and Summer’s weapon collapsed back into its more compact tanto form, sheathing it as she ambles back to Qrow’s side.

“So,” he said, looking at the fading petals drifting on the breeze, “your Semblance is speed?”

“Short range teleportation,” Summer said, “though I can see why you’d think that. You?”

Qrow grimaced.

-

He doesn’t cry when Ruby unlocks her Semblance. Red rose petals drift across the training field in her wake and his jaw drops.

“What do you think, Uncle Qrow?” she asks, guileless and delighted as she races back and forth and finally stumbles to a halt in his arms with an extended “Whoa!”

“I think,” Qrow answers dutifully, “you’ll have to be careful with expending your Aura, especially at the beginning.”

“But?” Ruby asks, eyes alight even with some nerves beginning to show through.

“But,” Qrow says, “it’s pretty amazing, just like your mom’s.”

He punctuates the comment with a ruffle of her hair and she beams up at him.

That night he mixes his usual whiskey into the chamomile tea that Summer would finish her days with. If he cries, all of the evidence is gone with the tea by the time Tai stumbles home from Signal.

-

Tai pursued Raven with a fearlessness that Qrow could only dream of. He didn’t mind his team being affected by his Semblance quite so much when he was kept awake by Tai’s chainsaw snoring and all the little frustrations from living in constant, compact space with strangers. But then he got used to them. And unlike Raven, they hadn’t developed a resistance to his Semblance.

The first member of the team who’d been hurt was Summer. 

His partner Summer, who had written off the incident as a training accident from sparring with the asshole member of another team. Who had been hurt when Qrow was watching and who knew what his Semblance meant to those in his proximity.

How could he drag someone into that danger when he couldn’t even deal with his friends getting hurt by it?

-

It was Summer who kissed him. In all the times he’d dreamed it, he’d thought they would be in their own clothes, out in the forest training or on a mission. Instead they’re in their school uniforms in the corner of their dorm room, Summer stood up on her toes--even before his growth spurt he was still noticeably taller--hands gentle on his shoulders and waited. 

She waited to give him time to dodge or leave. He hadn’t been strong enough. Not against her.

It was a secretive time. Ozpin was already beginning to ask much, much more of their team than of any others in their year. In a few months, Ozpin would offer Qrow and Raven a portion of his power, timing it so that they could learn it between school terms.

“It’s worth it,” Summer said in response to a question Qrow could not ask.

Qrow knew then it was already too late. Crows are monogamous birds.

-

“What if,” Summer said one night in their dorm room, perched in the window and looking out past her reflection, “what if when we have kids--wouldn’t it make sense to raise them all together? As a team?”

Qrow cocked his head, gaze shifting from the model Raven was bossing Tai through the construction of. “What are you thinking?”

Summer’s mouth quirked, but tellingly she didn’t look away from the window. Qrow had had the misfortune to both observe and experience Summer’s intense focus when lecturing on any number of uncomfortable topics; this avoidance meant Summer was feeling particularly vulnerable.

“I’m not sure any of us will have parents or guardians left to support us, if anything should happen,” Summer said. She hadn’t said anything of her own parents, only mentioning her two aunts to Qrow in passing; if that was what she told her partner, that might be all there was to say. He knew that the tribe would just as soon abandon a child as raise it. And Tai had only his mother, perpetually away on some distant patrol.

Yeah, Qrow could see where that was headed. And if he could, so could the others.

“Just a thought,” Summer said, realizing that the rest of them were watching her.

“I don’t know if I’ll have any kids,” Qrow said, “but if you or these numbskulls have any, I’m in.”

Summer squeaked but finally looked at them. Qrow flashed her a grin and together they turned to Tai and Raven.

“Sometimes,” Tai said, mock serious, “a family is a team, their partners, and however many kids they have and-or find.”

“When you put it like that,” Raven said. The rest of the team stared at her in befuddled horror. “I kid, I kid. I’m in.”

-

That was that until the baby was all but ready to come. Tai filled his days at Signal teaching. Qrow was away on one of Ozpin’s missions, filling in while Raven rested; all he knows is secondhand, except that Summer took a break from missions to go help. The baby came--Yang came.

By the time Qrow made it back, Raven was gone.

-

What Qrow does not know is this: Raven had been struggling even before the baby came. The midwife said that everything she had been dealing with were simple, ephemeral baby blues.

Summer’s assurances did not reach her, but still she tried. When Qrow asked, Summer had tried to smile and said she couldn’t return to missions, not yet, she was still needed there. So Summer stayed and tried to help as unobtrusively as possible.

One morning Summer woke to Yang crying--not a desperate, hungry cry, but some small cry for comfort that unchecked would soon grow large. She opened her eyes and Raven was there, Yang in her arms.

“Take her,” Raven said. “Be her mother.”

“Raven--” Summer began, but Raven she shook her head and proffered Yang once more.

“Please,” Raven begged. “I can’t be her mother. But you three can take care of her.”

Summer took Yang. “You’ll always be part of my team, Raven. We’ll be here for you.”

Raven inclined her head and was gone. Summer and Yang cried together.

-

“This can’t go on, Tai,” Qrow says when the door opens. It’s late--too fucking late. Qrow has already cobbled together a pale, aching mirror of the team dinners of their Academy days, Yang and Ruby settled on the counters and watching him move about the kitchen like he might disappear too. He’s already put them to bed--following Yang’s instructions as closely as he can manage--Ruby drops off easily but for the longest time Yang is watching him with wide, scared eyes whenever he looks up from their storybook. Qrow had kept reading until finally the day’s exertions carried Yang under.

And still Tai wasn’t home yet. Anyways, Qrow had known he wouldn’t be able to sleep yet.

“Qrow?” Tai says, some glimmer of understanding shining through the fog of his grief.

“I’ve talked with Ozpin,” Qrow says. “I can’t leave things like this.”

“What about--” Tai says, doubtless remembering all the conversations Summer and Qrow had had across the years.

Qrow grimaces. “They almost died today, Tai. Better--better bad luck protector than a Grimm, yeah?”

“Goddess bless,” Tai says, burying his head in his hands and weeping.

-

A mug breaks in Qrow’s hand. The sound of it is a clamp on his heart and he wonders if he’s made the right choice. Then there’s a noise coming from behind him.

“Ruby,” Qrow says, “hey kid, what’re you doing up?”

Ruby is clearly newly-woken, rubbing at a flushed cheek with one tiny fist. Soft hair peeks out of her little hood--Yang had never tolerated those at the same age. Then she’s lifting her arms in a clear plea, already shuffling closer.

“No, kid, stay back,” Qrow says helplessly watching her progress into the danger zone. Ruby persists. Qrow picks her up, just to keep her clear of the glass while he gets it clean up, and feels her sink bonelessly against him with a blissful burble.

The fear still has its grip on his heart but Qrow keeps going. Soon enough they have the broken glass cleaned up.

“We’re alright, kid,” Qrow says. Maybe if he says it often enough he’ll believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from before Team STRQ was STRQ and I was convinced it would be SQTR ("Scatter").  
> This fic draws more than I expected from that time my sister became a single mom and ways I was asked to step in and could not. Throwback to 14 year old me who was not as ready to do aunt-shaped things as I am now. Damn. It's been a decade.


End file.
